On July 14th, 1789, the French people stormed the Bastille, and put an end to the feudal monarchy that had ruled over them for a millennia.
On August 26th, after long and fiery debate, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was proclaimed, laying the foundations for a free and equal society.
However, for some, equality would remain forthcoming until over 150 years later, when an existentialist philosopher by the name of Simone de Beauvoir would rise and usher in second-wave feminism to deliver unto women the same rights that their male counterparts had been enjoying for centuries.
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Simone de Beauvoir was born Simone Ernestine Lucie Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir on January 9th, 1908. A bourgeois family of wealthy background, de Beauvoir’s parents were proud of their social status until a loss of fortune following World War I threatened to take it all away.
Desiring to ensure de Beauvoir and her younger sister Helene had the best upbringing possible, mother Francoise – who had not gone a day without servants in her life – took all the housework upon herself so that the pair could study at an elite convent school in the Paris area.
De Beauvoir was a deeply religious child, and aspired to become a nun, until she abandoned her faith as a teenager to embrace the passionate Parisian nightlife. Such activity was seen as ‘unbecoming’ to someone of her social standard, and was enough to lead to her father declaring that no man should ever want her, and that she would never marry.
By that point, de Beauvoir did not care. She had opened her eyes to the real world, and was on a journey to live the life she wanted, not the one many were eager to thrust upon her. “…my father’s individualism and pagan ethical standards were in complete contrast to the rigidly moral conventionalism of my mother’s teaching. This disequilibrium, which made my life a kind of endless disputation, is the main reason why I became an intellectual,” she would write in her memoirs.
She studied hard, and was a gifted intellectual (apparently, her father would often boast “Simone thinks like a man!”). In 1925, she passed the final maths and philosophy examinations that allowed her entry to the Institiut Catholique de Paris where she learnt complex mathematics, and the Insitut Sainte-Marie, at which she studied literature and language.
From there, she took philosophy courses at the University of Paris, and received her degree in 1928, making her the ninth-ever woman to graduate from the school.
The following year, she prepared for the agrégation, a nation-wide examination that ranked postgraduate philosophy students. It was here that she would meet Rene Maheu, Paul Nizan, and Jean-Paul Sartre, an elitist group, and the greatest intellectuals in the room. Naturally, de Beauvoir would come to join them. Sartre would narrowly take first place over de Beauvoir, who at age 21 became the younger person to ever pass the exam.
Sartre and de Beauvoir developed a romantic, but nevertheless open relationship around this time. When de Beauvoir’s father found out, he confronted them, leading to Sartre hastily offering to marry her. Her response? “Don’t be silly.”
Their relationship would last until their deaths, each playing a varied and integral part in the other’s personal and professional lives. Indeed, for decades to come, the pair would lead intellectual thinking across France through their work as teachers, writers, political campaigners and philosophers.
Over the years, discussion of Sartre would focus on his work, while discussion of de Beauvoir revolved primarily around her personal life. This was a fact she toyed with in her early novels. She Came to Stay was a 1943 fictional work based on the couple’s sexual relationship with students (that same year she was suspended from teaching for life over one such relationship), while The Blood of Others explored the importance of individual responsibility in a love story set against the backdrop of French resistance during World War II.
These were followed by two essays, the latter of which, The Ethics of Ambiguity, is often seen as the most accessible article for those wishing to learn about French existentialism.
It would be 1949’s The Second Sex that would come to best define the importance of de Beauvoir’s career. A damning insight into the oppression of women as ‘The Other’, the book fuelled what would become known as second-wave feminism, which brought attention to such social issues as domestic violence, a woman’s ‘role’ in the family and workplace, reproduction rights, and an individual’s right to express their sexuality.
“What is a woman?… The fact that I ask it is in itself significant. A man would never get the notion of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human male. But if I wish to define myself, I must first of all say: ‘I am a woman’; on this truth must be based all further discussion. A man never begins by presenting himself as an individual of a certain sex; it goes without saying that he is a man… It would be out of the question to reply: ‘And you think the contrary because you are a man,’ for it is understood that the fact of being a man is no peculiarity.”
“Men are the default setting and women are considered a recessive gender. ‘He is the Subject, he is the Absolute—she is the Other.'”
The book resulted in such a revolution of thinking across the world that it would be banned by the Vatican, and the US publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, refused to retranslate the essay after many of de Beauvoir’s initial concepts and ideas were butchered in the initial translation. It would be 60 years before a second, true edition would be made available.
After years spent as a socialist – de Beauvoir believed such a political system would be the only way to form a truly equal world – she declared herself a feminist in the early 70s. Her voice bolstered the French women’s liberation movement, resulting in the legalisation of abortion in 1974.
Though it was one of the most active decades in her career, de Beauvoir found herself contemplating the end of her life. She wrote The Coming of Age in 1970, in which she describes the decline of the human experience once someone reaches 60 years of age, and published A Farewell to Sartre shortly after his death in 1980.
Simone de Beauvoir herself would die on April 14th, 1986.
Though she was gone, her legacy was growing rapidly. Her work became the basis for many changes to social reform in Europe. Within a decade, there were seven times more women holding legislative seats across the continent than in the United States, which played a substantial part in bringing reform to support programs to women and children across the various nations.
Today, The Second Sex is just as relevant as ever. While women are still treated like ‘The Other’, we must strive to be better, we must strive for change, and we must bring about the true equality that de Beauvoir championed nearly 70 years ago.